Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews

Abstract

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

Keywords

Epistemics expert identity identity negotiation interviews master narratives positioning analysis story ownership telling rights WWII testimonies

Introduction

The observation that interviews ‘need to be conceived of as (inter-)action’ (Deppermann, 2013: 6–7) in which an interviewer is far from ‘a neutral conduit for the voice of the interviewee’ (Van De Mieroop and Clifton, 2014: 152), is by now a well-studied truism in the field of sociolinguistic narrative research (see e.g. De Fina, 2009; Johnson, 2008; Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann, 2000; Perrino, 2005; Slembrouck, 2015; Van De Mieroop and Bruyninckx, 2009). In particular, the interviewers’ agenda and the way they formulate their questions define the context in response to which narrators construct their answers and against which ‘stories are to be heard’ (Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann, 2000: 213). Furthermore, their actions as story recipients – such as showing attention and understanding, back-channelling and providing non-verbal reactions – inevitably imply their ‘stance towards the story’ (Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann, 2000: 213) and thus impact narrators’ subsequent contributions. Moreover, the narrators’ ‘perceptions, presumptions and fantasies about [interviewers’] interests and preferences’ (Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann, 2000: 213) also affect narrative content, as narrators tend to ‘engage in an implicit guessing game [. . . and] strive to give interviewers “what they want”’ (De Fina, 2019: 32). As a result, the interviewer – whether actively intervening or not – always acts as ‘a co-author of the narrative product’ (Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann, 2000: 202), which should thus be considered as ‘a joint venture and the outcome of negotiation by interlocutors’ (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008: 381).

Despite this well-established social-interactional approach to interviews as interactions, narrative research has thus far only paid limited attention to an important aspect of tellers’ strategies and recipients’ reactions, namely their epistemic motives (Norrick, 2020). In order to explore this, Norrick (2020) draws on Heritage’s (2012a, 2012b) model, which differentiates between interlocutors’ epistemic status and stance. On the one hand, epistemic status corresponds with tellers’ ‘matter of fact’ (Heritage, 2012a: 32) access to particular ‘epistemic domains’ (Stivers and Rossano, 2010) or ‘territories of knowledge’ (Kamio, 1997). As epistemic status is stratified between interactants, they can be positioned on an ‘epistemic gradient’ (Heritage, 2012b: 5), from more ([K+]) to less ([K-]) knowledgeable. On the other hand, epistemic stance concerns how tellers position themselves in terms of epistemic status within an interaction and is thus ‘encoded, moment by moment, in turns at talk’ (Heritage, 2012a: 7). Importantly, while epistemic status and stance may be congruent in interaction, they can also be (re)negotiated in ‘epistemic competitions’ (De Stefani and Mondada, 2017: 97), which allow interactants to ‘appear more, or less, knowledgeable than they really are’ (Heritage, 2012a: 33). In narrative contexts in particular, tellers’ differing epistemic status concerning specific topics, endows them with diverse telling rights regarding those topics (Norrick, 2020). Significantly, tellers’ epistemic authority may be based on numerous different grounds. For example, the recency, provenance, certainty, clarity and extent of a teller’s information, as well as their independent access and their societal right to know specific information and their ‘spatial/temporal proximity or insider/expert knowledge [of events] can reinforce telling rights’ (Norrick, 2020: 213; Heritage, 2012b) concerning a particular epistemic domain. Generally, an interactant can claim primary epistemic authority and story ownership, if they have witnessed and were affected by the reported events (Sacks, 1992; see also Shuman, 2005), as their personal experience provides them with ‘indisputable insider knowledge’ (Norrick, 2020: 220). Hence, first-hand experience grants tellers ‘a privileged position as knowers and a legitimate stake in the interpretation of their own experience’ (Shuman, 2005: 3), which in turn ‘entitles’ them to tell their story. In other words, story ownership and telling rights are closely interwoven, as individuals typically are entitled to tell the personal experiences they had and are thus considered to own (see also Van De Mieroop, 2021).

Consequently, an important distinction with regards to epistemic authority and telling rights is often made between narratives of personal and vicarious experience (see Bolden, 2018; Norrick, 2013a, 2013b; and also Pomerantz, 1980: on Type 1 – viz., first-hand – and Type 2 – viz., hearsay – knowables). Significantly, narratives of vicarious experience complicate the ownership-tellership principle, as narrators can claim a performance of a particular story as their own, not because they personally experienced it, but because it has ‘a place in the life narrative of the person speaking and fit[s] with their viewpoint on the world and intentions in storytelling’ (Schiff et al., 2001: 166). Furthermore, vicarious narratives are typically accepted if their contextual significance – viz., illustrating a point or suggesting a moral – is high, as this allows the teller’s epistemic authority on the topic to become less important (Norrick, 2013a: 392). However, tellers of vicarious experiences are more easily perceived as having ulterior motives, which may lead recipients to question the validity of their story as well as their epistemic authority. In order to circumvent this, narrators often include epistemic grounds upon which their report is based, such as claiming generality or closeness to the events and story participants, vouching for the original teller, employing specialist terminology and appealing to expert knowledge (Norrick, 2020: 217–220).

Overall, interviews thus comprise an interactional context in which both interviewers and interviewees are faced with a myriad of ‘delicate positioning issues’ (De Fina, 2019: 21), among others in terms of epistemic authority, and, importantly, this is particularly visible as they go through processes of identity negotiation to establish who is who and who knows what. In order to construct their respective identities, interactants are met with ‘identity confrontations’ (Bamberg, 2005: 221) and we will focus, in particular, on epistemic competitions here. We will scrutinise these epistemic competitions in order to tease out how interactants construct their telling rights and identities within the interactional encounter and in relation to the wider social context.¹ In the following section, we outline our research question in greater detail, describe our data and discuss our method. Subsequently, we analyse two narrators’ interactionally negotiated identity work, after which we draw conclusions from our observations.

Research question, data and method

In this study, we thus scrutinise epistemic competitions and their effect on interactional identity negotiations of Jewish Holocaust survivors in interviews. Importantly, we conceptualise identity not as a stable concept, but as an ephemeral construct and a discursive-interactional process (see e.g. Hall, 2000) which is ever-changing due to narrators’ local positioning in both the storyworld (i.e. the past) and the storytelling world (i.e. the present). In particular, ‘positioning analysis’ allows for such a ‘discourse-based, interactional approach’ (Deppermann, 2013: 2), by combining a ‘sequential word-for-word analysis’ (Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann, 2000: 216) with a hermeneutical approach that links narratives to more general societal discourses. Importantly, positioning analysis not only scrutinises narrators’ represented identity work, but also studies their ‘enacted positioning’ (Wortham, 2000: 181) which arises from their performative self-construction. Specifically, we operationalise this by drawing on Bamberg’s (1997) conceptualisation of positioning, which consists of three interrelated levels:

How are the characters positioned in relation to one another within the reported events?

How does the speaker position him- or herself to the audience?

How do narrators position themselves to themselves?

(Bamberg, 1997: 337)

In other words, positioning level one corresponds with the ‘storyworld’ and positioning level two focuses on the interactional ‘storytelling world’. In our study, we stay in line with the suggestion made by Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2000) of scrutinising positioning levels one and two by applying a micro-analytical lens to the data. To this end, we conducted a detailed analysis of the discursive features and sequential characteristics (i.e. in terms of turn-taking) of the data and transcribed our data using the Jefferson (2004) transcription conventions. Specifically, we carried out micro-analyses of the narrators’ local identity work at the storyworld level, as well as the interactional negotiations and epistemic competitions surrounding this identity work at the storytelling world level. Importantly, these micro-analyses allowed us to tap into positioning level three, which is concerned with how the narrator ‘positions a sense of self/identity with regards to dominant discourses or master narratives’ (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008: 385). In particular, the storytelling world is governed by a myriad of master narratives, which can be defined as ‘all-encompassing and authoritative account[s] of some aspect[s] of social reality that [are] widely accepted and endorsed by the larger society’ (Acevedo et al., 2010: 125). Significantly, narrators tend to orient themselves to some highly personal version of such master narratives (see Clifton and Van De Mieroop, 2016) and construct their identity work accordingly, which gives rise to a reflexive relation between stories and the social context in which they are told.

In particular, we analyse two interviews with two different Jewish Holocaust survivors. The first interview was conducted by the WWII memorial site Kazerne Dossin (‘Mechelen Transit Camp’) and the second one by Stichting Auschwitz (‘Auschwitz Foundation’).² The narrators were interviewed by different interviewers and the interviews were both conducted in the first half of the 1990s in Belgium, which ensures that the interactants included in this study found themselves in a comparable spatio-temporal interview context and were likely affected by a similar set of master narratives. Importantly, in this study, particular attention is paid to ‘how much imposition of the interviewers’ agenda’ (De Fina, 2009: 255) took place in the interviews, given the interviewers’ affiliation with Belgian WWII memorial sites. Museums and memorial sites have historically been synonymous with ‘authority, authenticity [and] singularity’ (Kidd, 2014: 2), as they often exert their ‘authorial curatorial voice’ (Noy, 2017: 46) to create ‘epistemic cultures’ (Porsché, 2018: 9) in which they present ‘what should be known or remembered’ (Porsché, 2018: 37). By extension, the interviewers’ institutional affiliation provides them with epistemic authority regarding WWII, which potentially allows them to act as representatives of WWII master narratives. Hence, the interviewers may be expected to draw on this epistemic authority as they guide the interactional encounter with their research goals in mind. Importantly, the narrators in this study are also highly authoritative on the Holocaust and the WWII remembrance context, given their personal experiences as Jewish WWII survivors. Additionally, their Jewish ethnicity entitles them to increased telling rights regarding Jewishness and the Holocaust (see e.g. Noy, 2015). Hence, the narrators’ personal experiences and background provide them with epistemic authority on these topics, which they may draw upon to interactionally negotiate their identity work.

Importantly, the two interviews in this study were specifically selected on the basis of their extended interactional focus on the topics of Jewishness and the Holocaust. Considering the interviewers’ epistemic authority – as historical experts – and the narrators’ epistemic authority – as Jewish Holocaust survivors – epistemic competitions could be expected to have ensued on these topics. In the analyses, particular attention is thus paid to these epistemic competitions in order to scrutinise the interactional identity negotiations taking place and to explore whether the interactants’ knowledge claims allow us to tap into the relation between the narratives and their social context.

Analysis

In this section, we discuss two interviews with Jewish WWII survivors who we call Rachel and Ivo. For each narrator, we analyse two testimony fragments. In both cases the first fragment functions as a benchmark example of the specific narrator’s typical identity work and contains no extensive engagement between the interactants. In these fragments, our focus is on the storyworld and we will demonstrate that narrators tend to construct complex and multifaceted narratives and identities. In contrast to this, the second fragment in both cases focuses on the storytelling world and forms an illustration of the interactionally negotiated nature of the narrators’ identity work. As our analyses will show, both narrators interpret ‘Jewishness’ highly differently, a fact which will prove to be the topic of much interactional negotiation with the interviewers. In particular, throughout our analyses, we explore how both interviewers – to differing extents – draw on their epistemic authority to attempt and interactionally guide the narrators’ identity construction and storytelling, as well as how the narrators draw on their own epistemic authority in an attempt to counter the interviewers’ epistemic claims.

Rachel

The first two excerpts are narrated by Rachel, who is half Jewish. As we can derive from excerpt 1, in which she describes her time at ‘Mechelen Transit Camp’, Rachel does not automatically self-identify as Jewish:

(1) (IE = interviewee)

1	IE	ik heb de=euh (1.2) i have seen the=erm (1.2)
2		zo moet ik het wel noemen as i must call it
3		de prachtige joodse jeugd gezien the beautiful jewish young people
4		ik heb contact met die mensen gehad i have had contact with those people
5		ik heb ‘s avonds i have in the evening
6		ik heb le:ren mee de horah dansen euh i lea:rned to dance the horah along with them erm

In excerpt 1, Rachel briefly describes the Jewish people in ‘Mechelen Transit Camp’. Interestingly, she refers to them as ‘the beautiful Jewish young people’ (line 3) and ‘those people’ (line 4). By describing her perceptual experiences of ‘the Jewish youth’ – viz., ‘seeing’ them (line 3) – and by using the demonstrative pronoun ‘those’, it becomes clear that the narrator positions herself outside of this group. Hence, Rachel does not construct a Jewish ingroup of which she is a member, but in spite of this, she creates a certain level of affiliation between herself and the group by evaluating the Jews positively (cf., ‘beautiful’, line 3). This affiliation is further confirmed as she mentions the ‘contact’ (line 4) she had with them and the fact she ‘learned to dance the Horah³ along with them’ (line 6). While she constructs this as a joint experience (cf., mee, ‘along with’ in line 6), she at the same time constructs herself as a ‘learner’ in terms of Jewish cultural knowledge, which clearly distinguishes her from the other group members. Finally, the incorporation of such personally lived-through narrative details, also implicitly heightens the inherent credibility of Rachel’s narrative and underlines her epistemic authority on the basis of her personal insider knowledge.

Thus, in excerpt 1, we observed that Rachel constructs a somewhat complex identity in the storyworld. While she clearly does not present herself as a Jewish ingroup member, she does establish some kind of personal relation with this group, which she also evaluates positively.

Next, we compare Rachel’s own identity work with the way her identity is interactionally negotiated in the storytelling world in excerpt 2, which occurs right after Rachel has explained that she grew up in Antwerp as the daughter of a liberal-minded Jewish diamond worker and a Flemish mother:

(2)⁴ (IE = interviewee, IR= interviewer)

1	IR	maar in die hele periode heeft u dan but during that entire period did you
2		iets gevoeld van opkomend antisemitisme feel something of rising anti-semitism
3	IE	ja zeker eu:hm ten eerste hoorden wij yes certainly e:rm first of all we heard
4		wat er in:euh >nazi duitsland< gebeurde euh what in:erm >nazi germany< was happening erm
5		met de joodse mensen to the jewish people ((2 lines omitted))
8	IR	voelde u dat bij uzelf ook did you feel that yourself
9		dat u anders werd bekeken that you were looked at differently
10	IE	helemaal niet want euh not at all because erm
11		ik ik ben eigenlijk niet opgenomen i was actually not included
12		in de joodse maatschappij in the jewish society ((2 lines omitted))
15		en eigenlijk heb ik met de joodse godsdienst and actually i have with the jewish religion
16		ook nooit iets te maken gehad never had anything to do either
17	IR	maar op een bepaald moment is daar but at a certain moment that has
18		dus verandering in gekomen bent u daar wel thus changed you did come
19		met die met dat antisemitisme in aanraking gekomen with that with that anti-semitism into contact
20	IE	ja het is te zeggen ook nog niet direct in yes that is to say also not immediately in
21		euh negatieve zin euh erm a negative sense erm

In the initial lines of this excerpt, the interviewer probes for whether ‘rising anti-Semitism’ (line 2) affected the interviewee ‘during that entire period’ (meaning the pre-War period the interviewee had just discussed). This topic shift is not entirely surprising, in view of the strong association between the group of Jews and the topic of anti-Semitism, which can arguably be said to have a master narrative status within the WWII remembrance context. Interestingly, Rachel first confirms the interviewer’s question by a boosted affirmative particle (‘yes certainly’, line 3), but she then instantly presents herself as a member of the bystander-ingroup, rather than as a victim with first-hand experience of this, as she specifies ‘we’ (wij, line 3) had ‘heard’ (line 3) about anti-Semitism, thus framing it as a ‘hearsay knowable’ (Pomerantz, 1980). Furthermore, she stresses that anti-Semitism was a phenomenon taking place abroad – in ‘Nazi Germany’ (line 4) – thus further distancing herself from it. Finally, Rachel mentions anti-Semitism was something that happened to ‘the Jewish people’ (line 5). Hence, on the one hand she confirms the master narrative on anti-Semitism by strongly associating anti-Semitism with the group of Jews, but on the other hand, by using various distancing devices, she constructs herself as a distant observer, rather than a member of the Jewish ingroup (as was also the case in excerpt 1).

Nevertheless, despite the narrator’s clear identity work in lines 3–5, the interviewer reformulates his original question of lines 1–2 and again asks if she was personally affected (lines 8–9). In response to this, Rachel upgrades her initial response to an explicit denial, as her turn starts with the ‘extreme case formulation’ (Pomerantz, 1986) ‘not at all’ (line 10), which she emphasises by means of the prosodic stress on the first syllable. Subsequently, Rachel accounts for this negative response by stating that she was ‘not included in the Jewish society’ (lines 11–12) nor related to ‘the Jewish religion’ (line 15). Again, she emphasises the latter argument by an extreme case formulation (i.e. ‘never’, line 16). Hence, Rachel not only explicitly excludes herself from Jewish society and religion, but, at the same time, she also confirms the master narrative once more, namely that those who identified as culturally Jewish were affected by anti-Semitism.

In response to Rachel’s negative reply, the interviewer produces a factual statement, which establishes a turning point in her story and sets up a contrast (cf., ‘but’) that is projected to logically follow from the preceding turn (cf., ‘thus’): ‘but at a certain moment that has thus changed, you did come into contact with that anti-Semitism’ (lines 17–19). Consequently, rather than producing a follow-up question, the interviewer seemingly provides Rachel with the expected turning point that should (inevitably) be included in her story, namely that anyone who was Jewish, was – eventually – affected by anti-Semitism. Thus, the interviewer ignores Rachel’s epistemic authority as someone who personally witnessed and experienced the reported events and instead draws on his own authority as a historical expert, in order to guide the interviewee’s narrative output. In response, Rachel produces a token agreement (‘yes’, line 20), but then immediately hedges her answer (‘that is to say’, line 20) and refutes the negative nature of her experiences (‘not immediately in erm a negative sense’, lines 20–21). Through this positive evaluation, Rachel – yet again – deviates from the expected master narrative, whilst also asserting her telling rights as a witness by drawing on first-hand knowables (Pomerantz, 1980) and countering the interviewer’s expert authority.

In conclusion, in excerpt 2, the interactional work taking place illustrated an incompatibility between Rachel’s story and the master narrative anticipated by the interviewer. This master narrative seems to stipulate that in a WWII remembrance context, anyone who was Jewish, was affected by anti-Semitism. When the applicability of this master narrative was repeatedly countered by Rachel on the basis of her epistemic authority and credibility as a witness, the interviewer drew on his epistemic authority as a historical expert not only to question Rachel’s personal narrative, but also to eventually attempt to rephrase it himself. This indicates the interviewer’s difficulty in reconciling the master narrative with the narrator’s repeated refusals to align with it, thus resulting in an epistemic competition over the interviewee’s personal experiences and the presence – or absence – of a particular turning point in her story. This, in turn, made the master narrative almost tangible in the interaction

Ivo

Excerpts 3 and 4 are narrated by Ivo, in whose stories his complex relation with the Jewish religion often emerges. We see this also in excerpt 3, in which Ivo talks about his experiences in the transit camp of Sakrau:

(3) (IE = interviewee)

1	IE	en in dit sakrau (6.1) and in this sakrau (6.1)
2		hadden we in tussentijd was het rosj hasjana we had in the meantime it was rosh hashanah
3		het joodse nieuwjaar we hebben ‘s avonds ergens the jewish new year we have in the evening somewhere
4		een klein beetje in een kamertje (1.5) a little bit in a small room (1.5)
5		een kleine <een paar mensen beetje daar gewijd> some small <a few people worshipped a bit there>

After spatially orienting the listener in the storyworld (‘and in this sakrau’, line 1) and a long pause,⁵ Ivo introduces a temporal orientation by mentioning Jewish new year. This then becomes the focus of his story, and through the use of the Hebrew name (‘Rosh Hashanah’, line 2), which is explained in the subsequent line, and the use of the ‘we’-form (lines 2 and 3), the narrator constructs himself as a member of the ingroup of religious Jews. However, a shift in the narrator’s personal identity work then takes place in the form of a self-repair in line 5. As the religious ingroup becomes a group of agentive and practicing believers who ‘worship’, Ivo shifts from ‘we’ to ‘a few people’. While the narrator thus frames the religious event of ‘Rosh Hashanah’ as relevant for the whole ingroup (line 3), he subsequently also refrains from identifying himself with active participation in it (line 5). At the same time, this display of first-hand knowables (Pomerantz, 1980) establishes Ivo’s inherent credibility and epistemic authority as a teller of a narrative of personal experience.

Overall, in excerpt 3, Ivo’s identity construction revolved around his membership of the religious ingroup. This membership proved to be a bit complex, as Ivo shifted the agentive subject away from the we-form when the activities became more concrete. Consequently, we may hypothesise that the narrator constructs his identity as a religious Jew as relatively passive rather than active.

Next, we compare excerpt 3 with excerpt 4, in which Ivo’s religious identity becomes the topic of interactional negotiation in the storytelling world:

(4)⁶ (IE = interviewee, IR= interviewer)

1	IR	u bent gelovig opgevoed >u bent nu gelovig< you were raised religiously >you are religious now< ((2 lines omitted))
4		hoe (0.9) hoe staat het met uw geloof what (0.9) what was your faith like
5		op zo zo=n moment at such=a time
6	IE	op dat moment (1.1) nul at that moment (1.1) zero
7	IR	is dat (1.3) praktisch is that (1.3) practical
8		omdat u er geen tijd voor hebt because you do not have time for it
9	IE	euh men had geen tijd (.) men kwam erm one did not have time (.) one came
10		in de hoogdagen eventjes samen together a bit during holidays
11		maar=euh °men kon daar niet aan denken° but=erm °one could not think about that°
12	IR	u hebt niet een gevoel gehad you did not have a sense
13		van van (1.2) van revolte euh of of (1.2) of revolt erm
14		ik heb al >uit verhalen die ik dus< (1.3) i have already >from stories that i have< (1.3)
15		over over concentratiekampen heb gelezen about about concentration camps have read
16		dat er mensen ook rabbijnen of vrome joden that people also rabbis or pious jews
17		die daar he die zich absoluut daar niet who there erm there did absolutely not
18		(un) niet van hun geloof (un) did not from their faith
19		lieten af af=euh houden let themselves be kept from from=erm
20	IE	ik was wel volwassen £maar voor dat i was grown up £but for that
21		was ik nog niet volwassen genoeg£@ i was not yet mature enough£@
22	IR	uw=uw geloofsleven stond dus eigenlijk your=your religious life was thus in fact
23		laat ik zo zeggen >op een zeer laag pi- i shall say it like this >was at a very low le-
24		zeer laag pitje< very low level<
25	IE	ja heel laag pitje yes very low level
26	IR	u hebt niet de reflex gehad van welnu (.) you did not have the reflex of now (.)
27		is dit wa wa wa wat=euh is this wha wha wha what=erm
28	IE	ja ja (4.7) .hh euh ik zal een beetje yes yes (4.7) .hh erm i will tell you a bit
29		over het werk vertellen about the work

Excerpt 4 starts with a turn by the interviewer, in which he first establishes that Ivo was and is ‘religious’ (line 1), after which he probes for the status of the interviewee’s ‘faith’ (line 4) at the time of the war. However, in the following turn (line 6), Ivo specifies he was not religious at all during the war, by employing the emphatically pronounced, ‘quantitative’ extreme case formulation ‘zero’. The interviewer then asks him whether this was due to ‘practical’ (line 7) reasons or lack of ‘time’ (line 8). In this way, the interviewer prompts the narrator to give a further account for this, while even suggesting two candidate answers. This already shows that Ivo’s answer is at least somewhat unexpected. Additionally, the question is directed to Ivo personally (u, ‘you’, line 8, second person singular in the Dutch original), rather than being a general question. Significantly, instead of producing a personal answer, Ivo employs the gender-neutral indefinite pronoun ‘one’ (men, line 9), which indexes a rather vague group identity of religious prisoners here. Due to the pronoun’s undefined nature, it remains unclear whether the narrator is part of this group, which prevents a distinct ingroup from being established. We can hypothesise that Ivo refrains from identifying with the religious group for similar reasons as in excerpt 3, since the group in his answer is presented as agentive in lines 9–10 (‘one came together for a bit during holidays’) or that he employs the ambiguous pronoun men for reasons of ‘face’ (see Goffman, 1967) to distance himself from his faltering religiousness during the war. In any case, Ivo’s answer is clear in terms of its content, namely that he was not religious during the war.

In spite of this clarity, the interviewer asks a personal follow-up question in line 12. Once more, he questions whether Ivo did not feel like he had to fight for his religion (‘you did not have a sense of revolt’, lines 12–13). He then backs up his persistent line of questioning with his knowledge of the Holocaust, as he mentions ‘stories’ (line 14) he has read about religious Jews. As the interviewer did not personally experience WWII, these are of course narratives of vicarious experience. Importantly, he refers to multiple stories he has read and thereby ‘claim[s] generality’ (Norrick, 2020: 218) for his statements, which allows him ‘to establish epistemic purchase on the events’ (Norrick, 2020: 217). Moreover, the interviewer not only refers to these stories, but he also ‘ventriloquises’ (Cooren, 2010) these written sources in the interaction and thereby invokes their agentivity and status to reinforce his own epistemic rights and credibility. Importantly, the authoritative quality of the ventriloquised sources is rendered more powerful through their written mode, since written documents – unlike ephemeral spoken language – ‘have the capacity to last throughout space and time’ (Van De Mieroop and Carranza, 2018: 2), allowing interlocutors to ventriloquise them as facts. In addition, the epistemic status of the stories’ authors – viz., religious Jews who personally experienced the Holocaust – is invoked as well, and this allows the interviewer to further strengthen his own authority and telling rights (see Norrick, 2020).

In particular, by ventriloquising these stories, the interviewer invokes a specific WWII remembrance master narrative that stipulates that religious Jews – ‘rabbis’ (line 16) or ‘pious Jews’ (line 16) – are typically agentive characters who ‘did not let themselves be kept from their faith’ (lines 18–19) in a concentration camp context. The extreme case formulation ‘absolutely’ (line 17) is employed to further underline religious Jews’ resoluteness in not having their faith taken away. As a result, the interviewer successfully indexes the previously mentioned master narrative and thereby makes it clear which type of story religious Jewish narrators are expected to tell in a WWII remembrance context. Consequently, the interviewer seems to criticise Ivo’s story, which – as became clear from their interaction in previous lines – is not in line with the master narrative that is explicitly invoked here.

In response to this criticism, Ivo provides a further account and offers another reason than the previously mentioned lack of time, namely that he was ‘not yet mature enough’ (line 21). This formulation is interesting, as it, in a way, shifts the ‘blame’ to his younger, storyworld self, which allows his current, storytelling world self to save face, while it at the same time also implicitly affiliates with the moral point of the interviewer’s story, namely that efforts to protect one’s faith are admirable. Additionally, he uses a smile voice in lines 20 and 21 and ends line 21 with laughter, which is not unexpected in this context as ‘problematic content [generally co-occurs] with laughter’ (Norrick, 2005: 330). Hence, Ivo indirectly indicates his discomfort at his story’s failure to align with the expected narrative, and through this orientation to the interviewer’s questions, he at the same time confirms the validity and morality of the master narrative invoked by the latter. This is then followed by a summarising statement by the interviewer about Ivo’s ‘religious life’ during the war (line 22). In particular, the interviewer probes for a confirmation that Ivo’s faith was at ‘a very low level’ (lines 23–24). Once more, Ivo confirms this (‘yes very low level’, line 25), and this is then yet again challenged by the interviewer by a follow-up question regarding this topic. Specifically, he asks whether Ivo ‘did not have the reflex of’ (line 26), and then, when he starts to formulate a hypothetical direct reported speech utterance (‘now is this wha wha wha what=erm’, lines 26–27), this turn ends in reformulations and a hesitation. However, we can assume the interviewer is referring to the reflex implied in the previously ventriloquised stories (lines 14–19), in which religious Jews did not let go of their faith in a concentration camp context.

Interestingly, Ivo’s following turn puts a full stop to the interactional negotiation taking place regarding his religious identity in the storyworld. First, he acknowledges the interviewer’s preceding turn (‘yes yes’, line 28). This turn is rather semantically void, as the ‘correct’ turn – that is, the second pair part answering the interviewer’s question in line with Ivo’s preceding story and identity work – would be a negative answer. Next, Ivo draws on his inherent telling rights as the narrator of his own personal story, to make the marked choice of abruptly shifting the topic of the interaction, thereby going against the ‘category-bound rights’ related to his situated identity of interviewee (see Boden and Zimmerman, 1991: 13). In particular, Ivo shifts to the topic of forced labour in the concentration camp (‘I will tell you a bit about the work’, 28–29), which is of course not in any way related to the focus of the preceding discussion.

In conclusion, in excerpt 4, we observed that the narrator’s complex identity work is subject to interactional negotiation. In particular, the interactional struggle that takes place shows a mismatch between Ivo’s nuanced identity in terms of religion and the interviewer’s expectations. These expectations are based on master narratives that circulate in the WWII remembrance context. Specifically, a master narrative was made explicit by the interviewer through his ventriloquisation of ‘stories’ (line 14) and this demonstrated the interviewer’s expectations about the behaviour and morality of (religious) Jews in a WWII context. By invoking these stories, the interviewer also established his identity as a historical expert and he drew on this epistemic authority to produce repeated inquiries about Ivo’s religious practices during the war. This clearly indicated the interviewer’s difficulty in reconciling the master narrative with the narrator’s repeated refusals to align with it. In response, Ivo drew on his inherent epistemic telling rights as a witness to produce a notable topic shift and thereby counter the interviewer’s line of inquiry. Hence, we can conclude that significant interactional negotiation took place throughout this fragment between the interviewer and interviewee regarding the latter’s personal story. This interactional negotiation culminated in an epistemic competition that uncovered in particularly explicit ways what the expectations of the interviewer were as well as the master narratives in terms of stories that can and should be told in this particular WWII remembrance interview context.

Discussion and conclusions

The aim of this study was to scrutinise the interactionally negotiated identity work of Holocaust survivors, whereby particular attention was paid to the interlocutors’ epistemic motives. In addition, the goal of our analyses was to uncover the reflexive link between these interactional negotiations on the one hand and the master narratives in the relevant social context on the other hand. As the analyses showed, Jewishness played a role in the identity construction of both narrators, though to different extents. Firstly, in excerpts 1 and 2 we observed how Rachel constructed a complex identity as she clearly distanced herself from the group of Jews, though she did occasionally create an affiliation with them by evaluating them positively and taking part in their activities. Secondly, in excerpts 3 and 4, Ivo identified himself as passively religious and clearly distanced himself from the group of actively religious Jews.

Consequently, Jewishness proved to have a wide spectrum of connotations and meanings throughout the narrators’ testimonies. Furthermore, both Rachel and Ivo constructed an identity which was only partially defined by Jewishness – be it ethnically, culturally or religiously. From a social constructionist perspective, this is what one would expect, namely that narrators locally construct a nuanced, complex and idiosyncratic version of a ‘Jewish’ identity for themselves and that a monolithic interpretation of Jewishness is not in line with the reality of people’s identity constructions. Nevertheless, from a lay perspective, as shown by the interviewers’ turns, the construction of such a complex and multifaceted identity is problematic. It is thus not surprising that this identity work in the storyworld was met by interactional ‘trouble’ and epistemic competitions in the storytelling world. Generally, the interviewers drew on their ‘expert knowledge’ (Norrick, 2020: 213) to assign epistemic authority – and thus telling rights – to themselves, despite the vicarious status of their knowledge. Additionally, their institutional affiliation and category-bound rights as interviewers further reinforced their entitlement, telling rights and their right to guide the interaction. Significantly, the interviewers employed a variety of different strategies to enact an epistemic stance that was congruent with their epistemic status of historical expert. In excerpt 2, this was implicitly reflected in the interviewer’s repeated inquiries regarding Rachel’s complex identity work, which then culminated in his factual statement that was aimed at vicariously establishing the turning point in her story. In excerpt 4, the interviewer employed more explicit strategies to ensure his telling rights, by drawing on ‘specialist knowledge’ (Norrick, 2020: 220) through the ventriloquisation of stories by WWII survivors. Overall, both interviewers thus attempted to display their high status on the epistemic gradient (Heritage, 2012b) within the historical epistemic domain on WWII in spite of their lack of first-hand experience.

Significantly, it was ‘the crucial differences between first person narratives of personal experience and third person narratives of vicarious experience’ (Norrick, 2020: 215) which allowed the interviewees to counter the interviewers’ epistemic claims related to their statuses as historical experts. Since the narrators personally experienced the Holocaust and were thus able to produce highly detailed narratives, their story ownership and the credibility of their WWII experiences was inherent and indisputable, as is the case for their ‘[K+] status’ in the personal epistemic domain on WWII. As a result, the interviewees could rely on ‘automatic rights to tell’ (Norrick, 2020: 220) and enact a high epistemic stance in this domain in order to challenge the interviewers’ claims, despite the latter’s epistemic authority through their expert status and vicarious WWII knowledge. While the interviewers worked hard to insure their credibility, the narrators could draw on indisputable insider knowledge of their personal experiences, which was further emphasised by the personally lived-through narrative details included in their stories. We thus observed a clash between two epistemic domains – namely that of personal experience versus that of historical expertise – and we could demonstrate that in the WWII remembrance context ‘[K+] status’ in the personal epistemic domain is prioritised. While in recent decades there has been a growing consensus that ‘survivors are not saints . . . [and] we should consider survivors’ words in the same light as the words of other human beings’ (Schiff et al., 2001: 189–190), the dominant view remains that ‘victims come highest on the scale of trustworthiness of witnesses to history. In contrast to that of . . . bystanders, the trustworthiness of victims is generally not questioned’ (De Jong, 2018: 116). Consequently, the specific interview context provided the narrators with a storytelling world in which their status as epistemic authorities is particularly robust. Nevertheless, the negotiation taking place between the interactants did affect the narrators’ identity work. In particular, the narrators were required to do ‘“additional” rhetorical work in order to be heard “correctly”’ (Bamberg, 2005: 224). The narrators employed various discursive strategies – such as high narrative detail, repetitions, extreme case formulations, prosodic emphasis and so on – in order to counter ‘possible misunderstandings’ (Bamberg, 2005: 224) regarding their self-positioning. As a result, their identity work became more pronounced and conspicuous in the course of these epistemic competitions, as opposed to instances in which there was minimal engagement with the interviewer.

Furthermore, the interactional difficulty between the interactants revealed the mismatch between the interviewers’ expectations and the narrative content being produced. Significantly, in instances where these interactional negotiations culminated in epistemic competitions, the – usually rather ephemeral – Holocaust master narratives circulating in the storytelling world became particularly tangible, as interviewers’ repeated inquiries revealed their knowledge of and orientation to these master narratives. Due to their clearly delineated perception of these master narratives, the interviewers showed difficulty in reconciling their expected narrative with the narrators’ complex and nuanced identity work. In particular, in excerpt 2, the interviewer repeatedly drew on the master narrative which associates Jewishness with anti-Semitism in a WWII context. In excerpt 4, the interviewer evoked the master narrative that religious Jews can be expected to actively adhere to their faith in a concentration camp context. The interviewers’ repeated explicit orientations to these master narratives showed their anticipation that narrators should identify as culturally and religiously Jewish in line with the expected narrative. These expectations held by the interviewers can be hypothetically explained by a variety of reasons. There may be personal idiosyncratic interests of the interviewers at play (see e.g. the reference to stories the interviewer knows in excerpt 4). Alternatively, the interviewers may have had the aim of collecting stories that fit in with museums’ typical goal of exhibiting coherent narratives to their audience (see Wolff et al., 2012). Importantly, this is particularly true in history museums, ‘where past events are made to successively align with chronologically ordered displays’ (Noy, 2020: 2), in order to engage the audience of museumgoers. Consequently, it is rather likely that the interviewers – due to their institutional affiliation – drew on their epistemic authority in an effort to guide the interaction and conduct interviews in which narrators clearly and coherently identify themselves as Jews who were affected by the Holocaust, in ways perceived as stereotypical by the interviewers.

However, we can assume that there was an important discrepancy in imagined audience between the interviewers and interviewees, as the latter did not aim to construct a coherent and unified identity that is easily comprehensible to an audience of museumgoers. Instead, both narrators consistently refused to align with the master narratives topicalised by the interviewers and constructed a nuanced and complex, rather than a straightforward, rendition of their life story, for a presumably more generalised ‘ghostly audience’ (see Minister, 1991). As a result, through their discursive actions, these particular interviewees refuted the claim that narrators ‘strive to give interviewers “what they want”’ (De Fina, 2019: 32) and thus offered an insight into alternative ways of dealing with interviewers’ attempts to manage topics and project stories upon interviewees.

Overall, this article illustrates that instances in which interactants’ ‘interactional moves and negotiations’ (De Fina, 2019: 24) culminate in epistemic competitions allow us to more effectively uncover the reflexive link between narrators’ interactional identity work and the social context. On the one hand, the interviewers – who relied on their epistemic authority as historical experts – both adhered to master narratives in the WWII remembrance context and as a result topicalised these in their epistemic competitions with the narrators, thus bringing the master narratives closer to the surface. On the other hand, the interviewees – who relied on their inherent epistemic authority as witnesses – reacted to the interviewers’ challenges by producing highly nuanced narratives of personal experience, due to which these master narratives became even more perceptible. However, these epistemic competitions between the interlocutors did have a significant impact on the narrators’ identity work, as the narrators responded by constructing a more distinct and marked self-positioning in order to protect their construction of a complex, nuanced and credible identity. Consequently, the epistemic competitions taking place in the storytelling world shaped the narrators’ identity work in the storyworld, whilst proving important in making the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Kim Schoofs is a post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium. In her PhD (2020) she explored new ways of uncovering the dialectic relation between the local-discursive construction of identities on the one hand and master narratives in the social context on the other hand. Kim’s main research interests cover identity work in narrative and interactional data, networked narratives on social media and persuasive communication.

Dorien Van De Mieroop is an Associate Professor at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her main research interests lie in the discursive analysis of institutional interactions and of narratives, about which she published more than 30 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, authored a book with Jonathan Clifton and Stephanie Schnurr on ‘The language of leadership narratives’ (2020) and edited a volume with Stephanie Schnurr on ‘Identity struggles’ (2017). She is co-editor of the journal Narrative Inquiry.

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